De Palma: Obsession (1976)

Obsession is Brian De Palma’s great tribute to Vertigo, developed from a screenplay by Paul Schrader that relocates the film to 1959 New Orleans and 1975 Florence. However, Schrader has repeatedly disavowed the film, on the basis that De Palma cut most of his screenplay, and that’s not hard to believe, since there’s very little screenplay at all – the film’s fantasy is that Hitchcock didn’t need screenwriters, and that De Palma’s inheriting a mantle of undistilled auteurism. That makes for a burnished sense of purity and purpose, a vision of how Hitchcock might have looked if his entire post-1959 career had been dedicated to refining and distilling Vertigo – a film, in other words, that consists of little more than tracking shots and trailing sequences, a gesture of obsession as much as devotion. In some ways, that does away with any need for narrative momentum, and that’s probably a good thing, since, for anybody who’s seen Vertigo, the narrative twist is pretty clear from the outset – unlike most of De Palma’s other Hitchcock homages, there’s really one one film being referenced here. More strangely, it does away with suspense – or, distributes it equally across the entire film, meaning that everything feels suspended, distended across a dream. Scenes that aren’t actually shot in slow-motion are always on the verge of slow-motion, while every scene continually feels as if it’s just beginning and just about to end.  That sense of emergence makes for some of Hitchcock’s most powerful moments – the dawning of a revelation that has somehow already occurred – but it’s quite unusual to see it extended into such sustained canonical reverence; watching it is a bit like seeing Hitchcock enshrined in the stately classicism of Louisianan and Florentian architecture (at a time, incidentally, when Hitchcock himself was still actually working, and had just shot Family Plot in San Francisco). If there is any auterist concession, it’s in the way De Palma calls upon Bernard Herrmann, whose score is more continuous than in nearly any of Hitchcock’s films, and as architectural as De Palma’s direction – it provides a continual cloister within which Hitchcock can be contemplated and worshipped. And it’s here that things come full circle and we start to glimpse Schrader’s film – the true double that haunts the narrative – as a kind of reimagining of Hitchcock as a transcendental director, spiritually akin to Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, whom Schrader had tackled academically some years before. In that sense, it’s a true canonical gesture – it eternalises Hitchcock and, in doing so, transfigures him, but with so much conviction that it’s hard not to believe, momentarily, that this is the Hitchcock we’ve always known and loved.